James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“Ain’t got time for this, Woodrow.”

Woodrow peeled three more cards off the deck and snapped them down in a vertical line traversing the circle. “See, there’s the joker, right over the head of the one-eyed Jack. That means our man, the one-eyed Jack, is a full-time fool. Sure you don’t want to rename your song ‘The Dumbest Nigger in Camp Number Nine’?”

But Junior only stared at the fires and brown clouds of smoke on the horizon and the buzzards that were slowly descending in a vortex toward a woods on the far side of the bayou.

Woodrow put three cards down on the step in a horizontal line, completing a cross inside the circle. Junior expected another ridiculing remark but instead there was only silence. He glanced sideways at Woodrow. “Why you got that look on your face?” he said.

Woodrow started to scoop the cards up. But Junior held his wrist.

“Answer me, Woodrow,” he said.

“It’s just a card trick. Been playing it on people for years. Don’t none of it mean any ting he replied.

Junior peeled loose a card that was cupped inside Woodrow’s palm. “How come you trying to hide the Jack of spades?” he asked.

Woodrow rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand and stared sadly at the bayou. “It’s Boss Posey, Woodrow. Lawd Gawd, it’s Boss Posey. Why you gone and done this to yourself?” he said.

Then he rushed away to be by himself, leaving his deck of cards scattered on the steps.

The next day Junior received a contract in the mail from the recording studio. He sat on the edge of his bunk and read the letter that accompanied it, then walked to the fireplace and held a match to the letter, the contract, and the envelope they came in and watched the pages blacken and curl into ash on the hearth. The next morning at bell count Junior stood unshaved and dirty in the front row of men who were about to go into the fields to trench fire lines around unburned cane and shovel dirt over stubble that was still smoldering. Jackson Posey looked at the puffiness around his eyes and sniffed at his breath. “Where’d you get the julep?” he said.

“Don’t remember, boss,” he replied.

“Woodrow, run back to the shed and bring me a case of them empty pop bottles,” Posey said.

Woodrow started toward the rear of the camp.

“I said run, boy.”

“Yow, boss,” Woodrow said.

He ran to the shed and lifted a wood case of Royal Crown Cola bottles by the handles and closed the door behind him with his foot, the bottles clinking between his hands. Then, as though a choice lay before him that would forever define who he was and the place he would inhabit in the world, he hesitated. On the perimeters of his vision he could see the LeJeune home high up on the slope, built to resemble a steamboat, surrounded by live oaks and palm trees; he could see a bulldozer and scooped out hole between the camp and the house where a damaged gas storage tank had just been removed; he could see the soot and brown smoke blowing out of the fields, the buzzards circling in the sky, the barbed wire that surrounded the camp, the tin roofs of the cabins already expanding against the joists with the heat of the day, the hard-packed clay smoothness of the yard, the gun bulls and trusty guards already mounted on their horses, most of them armed with double-barrel, cut-down shotguns whose steel was the color of a worn five-cent piece, and in the midst of it all, Woodrow’s best friend, Junior Crudup, drunk on julep made from yeast, raisins, and cracked corn boiled in a syrup can, about to be destroyed by his own pride.

Drop the bottle case on the ground, he told himself. Let them ship you back to ‘Gola. Do cain’t-see to cain’t-see on the Red Hat Gang, take the sweatbox treatment on Camp A, but don’t hep them to hurt Junior. Please, Lawd, make me be strong when I am weak, he prayed.

“Goddamn it, boy, move your ass!” Jackson Posey shouted.

“I’m coming, boss!” Woodrow said, running, the empty pop bottles rattling inside their wooden slots.

Junior sat down on the ground, pulled off his shoes and socks, and mounted the pop bottles, extending his arms out sideways for balance.

The other men marched out the front gate, their-eyes straight ahead, and began climbing into the trucks that waited for them. When the trucks drove away in the dust, Woodrow looked through the slats in the tailgate and saw his friend quivering like Jell-O atop the rows of R.C. Cola bottles, his pain sealed inside his closed eyelids.

Junior was still there when the trucks returned in the evening. Except he didn’t look like Junior anymore. There were skinned places on his face and knots on his head; one eye was swollen shut and his denims were dark with his own urine.

At sunset Junior was allowed to come off the box and sit in one corner of the yard. As the other men passed on their way to the mess shack, they saw the bottoms of Junior’s feet and had to look away. But Junior’s trial by ordeal was not over. Jackson Posey stood over him, thinking private thoughts, touching at the corner of his mouth with one finger. Posey looked up the slope toward the gouged hole in the landscape where a gas storage tank had been pried out of the ground.

“Get your shoes on, Junior. Woodrow, bring a spade from the shed and get my lunch bucket and a chair from my office,” Posey said.

The three of them walked together up the slope in the twilight, Junior limping like he had glass in his shoes, while purple martins darted through the haze of smoke in the air. A fat, thumb-buster .45 revolver creaked in a holster on Boss Posey’s hip. Woodrow set down the chair for Boss Posey to sit in and speared the spade into a huge mound of wet clay by the hole, then set down Posey’s lunch bucket on the ground by the chair. For just a moment he thought he smelled rain inside the wind.

“You don’t need me no more, huh, boss?” he said.

“Hunker down on the dirt pile and keep me company,” Posey replied, opening his lunch bucket and removing a pint of whiskey.

He wants you to attack him, Junior. Then he’s gonna kill you. He brung me to be a witness and cover his ass, Woodrow said to himself. Look at me, Junior. Can you hear the words I’m t’inking?

“Dozer man run out of gas today, Junior. So you got to fill up that hole for me. Better get on it,” Posey said.

“Stood all day on the bottles, boss. Ain’t got nothing left,” Junior said.

“You done this to yourself, boy.” Posey unscrewed the cap on his whiskey bottle and took a sip, rolling it in the corners of his mouth before he swallowed. Then he seemed to think a long time before he spoke again. “You believe you’re better than me, don’t you?”

“No, suh,” Junior replied.

“Smarter, been more places, slept with better-looking white women than I have. Been wrote up in northern magazines. A man like me don’t get his name in the paper lessen it’s in the obituary.”

Junior pulled the spade out of the clay mound and began shoveling into the hole, keeping his bruised feet stationary, swiveling his back to throw each spadeful. Boss Posey drank from the bottle again, then removed a piece of wax paper-wrapped chocolate cake and a slapjack from his lunch bucket. The slapjack was perhaps eight inches long, thin, mounted on a spring, lead-weighted and swollen at the tip, like the head on a snake. He rested it on his thigh and ate part of the cake, then put both the slapjack and the remnant of the cake back in the lunch bucket.

The sun dipped over the rim of the earth and the fields went dark and night birds began calling to one another in the woods across the bayou.

At first Woodrow tried to close his eyes and sleep on his feet. Then, without asking permission, he sat down on the back side of the pile Junior was spading into the hole. But Boss Posey didn’t seem to mind.